Is capitalism good or bad?

This is a complex question which deserves a complex answer. Go to your local library and find some books about it.

how do i find books? recs?

this is a genuine question by the way, i don't know how to go and find worthwhile books about such a broad subject other than asking for recommendations. is there any systematic way to do this?

Capitalism is the worst possible way to exist.
It's what makes it easy for you to invest in Chinese slaves, it's best to invest in a political campaign that can undermine some regulation rather than to pay to conform to this regulation, it eats all up. The logic is simple that you will find the most profitable path, with little loss and most gain, at the cost of anything else, any ideal or person, nature, culture or anything else in its way. And if you don't, someone will do it for you and push you aside for if you have a little market either you maximize profit and get big big big or all you can do is pray a big chain don't open a franchise near you. No one was able to figure out a way to break this cycle as it takes it all in and transforms in a new form of itself like a zombie. You cannot pretend to be out of it, you cannot ignore money. Every war you can think of exists because someone wants someone else's property (or no-one's properties), because there is a single huge war that has been going since forever that dictates that if you stay in your place minding your business someone will come and rape all that you have and take it for himself. Capitalism is the joy of it.

Here's a quick list:

Paul Goodman Growing Up Absurd (1960)
Herbert Marcuse One-Dimensional Man (1964)
Ted Roszak Making of a Counter Culture (1969)
Andrew Hacker End of the American Empire (1970)
Limits to Growth study (1972)
Mashall McLuhan The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

das kapital
history and class conciousness
frankfurt school
situationits

thing is they were mostly right about capitalism but their proposals to overcome it are equally bad

>Herbert Marcuse One-Dimensional Man
Somewhere, sniffman just got a hateboner.

>Attributing moral value to an economic system.

How is highschool?

Bad; also

This

Neither, it just "is".

Some people prefer it because it provides their social class with extra mobility or because it's in-line with their personal ethics of distribution.

Good and Bad are weasel words.

Ideology at it's very purest.

Capitalism can produce its own defense of itself, that's the only reason anyone can defend it. Middle class idiots who think all they miss to be millionaire is that one chance of the gods or if they work really hard... Or that the problem of crime is because some people are evil or that wars actually come out of religion or ideological differences, or that technology is actually helping us be more free and that retarded shit.

Honestly, I took these books from an article I read. The article gives a historical perspective to capitalism as a system in a time and place.:

morrisberman.blogspot.com/2016/05/dual-process-only-game-in-town.html

This article also explains the present form of capitalism:
theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot

I would encourage you to use them as a primer and look at what resources you can get from them.

Democratic oligarchy with a command capitalist economy is the only good way

kapitalism is the ekonomisk policy of gorillas

Its shitty but its better than communism

No ideology is in itself inherently (holy alliteration) good or bad.

What he said, when the automation Revolution comes capitalism just won't work and must be replaced.

Yeah.... Meanwhile in every capitalist state in the world we prosper.. with supermarkets, ever increasing technology and an abundance of entertainment

Except Communism.

>in every capitalist state in the world we prosper
Mexico is doing great I agree.

Well shit son, you convinced me with that argument.

Capitalism promotes infinite growth and destroys whatever gets in the way of its success. It's basically cancer morphed into an economic system. And just like cancer, once it grows to a certain point it will kill itself and die, which is what we're currently seeing. We just need a system that's not focused on growth.

There is no capitalist state, because as I said, you cannot pretend to be outside of it. The world is capitalist, period. Even the outspoken attempts to challenge it had to respond to it. The US is not separate from Syria, Europe is not separate from Paraguay, Japan is not separate from Mexico. The US prospered with the World Wars in Europe, Europe prospered from the collonization of Africa, America and many more, there are rich people in Brazil exploring indirectly poor people in the US. It's global. And you cannot talk of prosperity without pointing to the misery from which it was able to build itself.

Abundance of entertainment comes from less and less people over time, big companies buying small companies. There is no creativity there, there are producers and investors trying to come up with a frankenstein hit of previous successes. There are no "people" working there, they are bound by each other to follow a scheme. Some criticize technology and science for creating atom bombs along with microwaves, I say microwaves are a worse invention than atom bombs. How much have our culture changed to eat microwave dinners, the unlearning of cooking, the brute excess of salt in pre-made food, of plastic produced from oil taken from god knows where, going to whatever dump you'll find. People lose their independence over their own food. Microwaves and supermarkets have produced more misery than joy. And do not mistake this for some luddite argument that we should live in the woods or something and that technology is bad, but as long as technology is produced along the capitalistic mindset, it will, like everything else, follows the capitalistic way: to make it easier, more productive and to crush all the humanity in its way for it. It works from above to bottom and it only gets down when you are sure there is no way for the people down there to be empowered with it. The cure of a disease is never going to be invented before they know how to profit from it (otherwise, they would be bad capitalists, better people though). A technology will never make it easy for you to produce energy at home, if they want you dependent of their system. Capitalism releases those in homeopathic doses until it can use them.

National Capitalism seems perfect.

What hurts capitalist societies the most is when outsourcing occurs, and when big markets sell out their own nation to expand internationally.

youtube.com/watch?v=zI5hrcwU7Dk

your trips convinced me my friend

Like Degrowth?

Pure free market Capitalism is cancer. Social Democracy is the only way. Socialism and Communism are just retarded. Social Democracy is basically Capitalism without free market. A strong labor movement to keep jobs in the country with strong measures of wealth redistribution to insure against poverty and severe inequality like we currently have. People seem oblivious to how wealthy America is but it's true that most of that wealth is held by the higher ups of society.

Capitalist economies actually have more redistribution than Socialists ones which have little to none. The real problem is redistribution ahs been curtailed with the rise of neoliberal economics. Japan doesn't do much redistribution cause their wages are more equal than Western countries.

It's good if you're good at it.

steadystate.org/discover/downsides-of-economic-growth/

Can you elaborate, please?

How is the moral system of the west/judeo-christian philosophy not inextricably linked to the morality that spawned & define capitalism?

Further, where do you differentiate the intersection of morals in every day life from capitalism in every day life?

Capitalism is not a system of ethics, but rather a system of nonethics. Capitalism doesn't claim to aspire to anything more than growth. The ways it does this are more about circumventing existing ethical frameworks. "What can I get away with?" is what is right in present day capitalism. In fact it's called neoliberalism, which seems to just mean the unchaining of capitalism from existing ethics. That's the only thing new about it.

Neither, capitalism is not 1D, it's 3D, you can take one axis to describe it.

How will Capitalism evolve?

What will a post capitalist world look like?

Capitalism is a tool that can be used for good or bad.

It is good for individual persons, however bad for the planet and society as a whole.
Capitalism is the very proof that humans are greedy fuckers who don't give a flying fuck about other humans.

>microwaves and supermarkets have produced more misery than joy
Jesus Christ this is entitled teenager: the post. Do you know how many people alive right now would love to have access to a wide variety of food and then be able to cook it whenever they want? Most people in 1st world countries eat better food and have quicker access to it than any other person at any point in history. People used to spend the majority of their time finding food to keep themselves alive and now people can have hot food in seconds. This is a direct result of capitalism but because "le corporate boogeyman" isn't humanistic enough, it's bad. Even people who work in Chinese factories have it better than without capitalism because without it they would be starving in the streets. If this is bait, well done. If you're serious pls kys.

Its good in a social democratic model

After reading both post I have to agree with the example of the microwave. The microwave was made with the capitalist. Clearly there's a downside to the capitalist ideology of infinite growth, and technology made along those lines of having more leave only diminishing returns. There's definitely consequences to such a system. To pretend there aren't is just naive.

Life could be far better, retard. You like your super healthy diet and lifestyle with your neurotoxic fluoride "mineral-enriched bottled water" and tap water, your leached estrogen from the plastic in bottled water, your estrogen and lead in car exhaust, your run-off estrogen from birth-control pills flushed in the water which gets in the tap water along with pharmaceutical waste, your lithium and lead sprayed into the air to supposedly learn more about "how weather works", your alpha-wave trance-inducing, metabolism-lowering, obesity-causing television filled with subliminals and infrasound moodaltering mindcontrol, your carcinogenic according to the UN microwave radiation that cell phones, the internet, radio, and television works on?

Do and say what you're told, masochist.

It's tremendous

Capitalism is what is.

The problem with a lot of outsourcing nowadays is that the regulations and minimum wage laws are stifling entrepreneurs and businesses so they move production to other countries to compete better in the market place.

I think we should limit the amount of regulations we have and cut minimum wage laws so that companies can grow and foster in the country.

It's not an argument about capitalism/marxism/monarchism etc. is good or bad. The good/bad comes in whenever a nation puts its people or foreign interests and profits first. Currently, capitalism seems pretty shitty because the US government is controlled by multiple different players. You can't storm Washington DC and expect to throw over the government anymore because they aren't the largest players in a citizens life. The people of a nation, capitalist or socialist, have become corporate stock. Promoting the goodwill of the nation is not realistic or beneficial if a large corporate player is not financially interested. Because of these things, it doesn't matter if you're paying 15% taxes or 65% taxes, the ones who control the nation will not be affected.

tl;dr it's pretty much the 'jews/1%/wall street/corporations/crony capitalists' controlling everything behind closed doors while we all suffer to daily politicking and globalism.

Definitely bait

>Do you know how many people alive right now would love to have access to a wide variety of food and then be able to cook it whenever they want?

That is precisely my point though. That technology at the service of capitalism will always work from above and down. They produce this "people who would love to have access to..", they are the misery I'm addressing. You're reaction is not at all surprising, it's not illogical or anything, you're not a fool, you're smart, because you do with what you can with the information that you've received and the way you've received. And the way we receive the idea of capitalism (by itself) sells this vision that it is distant from what produced this misery and close to what can aid in ending it, but that's not true. In other words, capitalism is responsible for the starvation that it is supposedly helping end with those microwaves, or that it is "creating jobs in China". Again to the point that you cannot pretend you don't live in a capitalist world. The Chinese slaves without their jobs wouldn't be dying in the streets, they would be working for themselves, to themselves, with what they have, except that would only work if it was to the interest of the Chinese government, the US government, anyway, to the rich. Which isn't. So the situation is produced in which there is an extremely profitable opportunity for paying nothing for these people to produce their shit, only because they make such a deplorable scenario that the most profitable thing for that slave to do is to accept such work. Another common argument in that sense is about Africa as an inherently poor continent, as if that had nothing to do with the breaking of the tribes and civilizations by Europe, the exploitation of the land, the pushing of hunter-gatherer people into their rules, anyway, into the capitalist world. In this scenario planted by capitalist media, Bill Gates is an angel who is aiding people God forgot by doing more than what is asked of him. Bullshit.

Capitalism works the best because its a reflection of our collective nature as human beings as an economic system.

There are several legal options out there to take advantage of and make a decent living out of, It's better providing an incentive and let people try and take it rather than providing no incentive and no progress gets done whatsoever really I think

Depends on if your country is cultured or not.

People are better off than they ever have been in history because of globalized capitalism. The daily wage has gone up everywhere. The people who have it the worst today are better off than they have been under any other economic ideology

Good compared to what? Compared to the alternatives? Absolutely.

>Veeky Forums - Literature

It's good, but only if you do it right ;^)

Kein Subjekt, keiner Satz.

It is good if it is guided by higher order ideals. It is bad if it succumbs to it's own artifice.

Which do you think applies to today's world?

I believe it is absolutely futile to discuss what is better and what is worse in such a non-historic way. There is no absolute means to begin talk of it so you'll always talking from somewhere and with certain standards and hope to believe this is a reliable account on what is better. Can we have the generations gathering together to discuss this? No, what we have is historical account, which means historic interpretation and reinterpreation. Also, as if there was any homogeneous transformation to this world anyway.

Is the daily wage the standard? Ok. Is daily wage going up everywhere a good news? Was it proportionate to what? If it was equal to everyone, then it doesn't matter, just adding 0s to everyone's account won't change what you can buy at the market. Are the poor less poor? Then that means the rich are less rich. Are the rich more rich? Then that means the poor are more poor.

And the idea that the world functions by the application of this or that economic ideology doesn't sit well either. Capitalism may have dethroned a few kings, but only for others to sit on the throne and rule in place of the king (and more effectively too). We are playing the same game responsible for the wars, the brutal slaughter, enslavery and collonization of any weaker group of people in the past 500 years. This is present, this is alive. South America has no chance of making it better than Europe because Europe took all of its gold, then profit from its cotton, coffee, sugar, etc. This inequality assures that any progress that can ever be made will be dictated by those above, not only in the ammount they'll allow for the others to have, but also what is the ideal they should strive to become.

Are people living better off? They don't look happy at all to me anywhere.

Literally billions of rural Chinese are voluntarily migrating from their bucolic 'paradises' to urban centers to work in factories for, comped to 'Western' standards, a pittance. Why? Because farming. Fucking. Sucks. And they are making more money for themselves and their families sewing jeans intended for fat fuck Americans than they will ever make trudging through buffalo shit and stagnant paddy water picking grain by grain with their fucking fingers.

Because "farming fucking sucks", you really believe that, user? Come on.

And they are not making money for themselves at all, I'm talking slavery. They get paid only enough not to be called slavery legally, it's barely enough for them to eat, some live right where they work. You underestimate the gravity of their situation.

correction:
What he said, when the automation Revolution comes humans just won't work and must be replaced.

>because there is a single huge war that has been going since forever that dictates that if you stay in your place minding your business someone will come and rape all that you have and take it for himself

you are describing nature not capitalism

Agreed, I am also looking forward to techno-fascism.

>industrialization
>virtual slave labor
>"good"

oh and look, those at the top, us, are still unhappy and would like nothing more than a small plot of land, clean water and a garden to tend to? what the fuck have we learned. something is not right

Yet a third of the population has been brought well above the poverty line and their middle class is growing at a rate that nearly surpasses domestic consumer goods production. But those are just silly statistics. Numbers don't mean anything. Things must be terrible, because captitalism is terrible. We don't need things like evidence when we can simply reason from first principles.

You've learned that there are diminishing returns to prosperity and that no amount of matetial wealth (over a certain baseline) will cover the fact that you live in an unforgiving universe and time only moves in one direction.

Honestly, though, don't take my word for it. The Chinese have Internet access. You can ask them yourself.

what bullshit slave-owner mentality is this? exploitative cycle is not prosperity, it only leads to the consolidation of power in the hands of the few. mutual wealth, innovation for the sake of the collective, altruistic service is the key to progress. world hunger, world cleanliness, proper boundaries, etc. these things are progress. not contextual "material wealth."

>time only moves in one direction

no, it manifests in cycles.

>*abating world hunger

Or, you know, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith.

Unhappy and better off are also not the same thing. I'm better off than Chinese workers but they may be happier than me. Capitalism wasn't created to make people emotionally happy, it was created to make money. It has raised living standards (better off) but an economic policy doesn't (and shouldn't) have emotional (happier) ties.

>en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics
>The second law of thermodynamics states that the total entropy of an isolated system always increases over time, or remains constant in ideal cases where the system is in a steady state or undergoing a reversible process. The increase in entropy accounts for the irreversibility of natural processes, and the asymmetry between future and past.

I also wish the world was better than it is. But it isn't. We take what we can get. Usually by force. Sometimes by asymmetric trade deals. I prefer the latter to the former.

>altruistic service
Good luck finding people to do things that overall helps everybody but takes away stuff from themselves. You're just fighting against human nature. Humans are selfish and capitalism works because it works with individual desire